If you are playing Nellie Forbush in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” which opened Thursday night at the Drury Lane Theatre under the open-hearted direction of Victor Malana Maog, it is unwise to fall too much in love with your character. Ensign Forbush might be a spunky straight shooter from Little Rock and the heroine of a 1949 classic musical, but she still walks out on her handsome Frenchman, not because he’s a widower but because he has little kids with skin of a different color than her own.

Nellie learns and grows in the course of the show, of course, and the final scene of “South Pacific” ends, most daringly for the times, with a reconstituted, multiracial family, perhaps the single most progressive stage picture found in any Broadway musical of the first half of the 20th century. But even in 1949, there was ample reason not to trust Nellie. Lessons carefully taught are not so easily forgotten.

To her great credit, the young Canadian actress, Samantha Hill, playing the role at Drury Lane, embraces what Nellie’s creators surely intended: a vibrant and warm young woman who nonetheless has to throw off a significant part of her own upbringing. For my money, the starker that contrast reads, the better any revival of this oft-revived musical works. Hill goes further than most, just not yet far enough for me.

Both Hill and Robert Cuccioli, who plays Emile de Becque, are Broadway stars of a level we don’t often see on the road these days or in the suburban musical houses. (Hill is a former Christine in the Broadway “The Phantom of the Opera” and a Cosette in “Les Miserables,” while Cuccioli was the original heartthrob Dr. Jekyll in Frank Wildhorn’s “Jekyll and Hyde”). They’re both superb singers, as such credits would suggest, and while the difference in their ages is greater than you usually would see even in “South Pacific,” Cuccioli turns that to his advantage. There’s an air of desperation about his de Becque, the sense that this is a man who knows Nellie represents his one last shot at love. No Nellie means eternal loneliness. Cuccioli dives deep into his own decay; the idea works, not least because it at least partially explains why he seems to forget he is a father when he goes off on a likely suicide mission with Lt. Cable, very intensely played here by Austin Colby, whom director Maog clearly sees as a sensualist hopelessly lost in the fog of war.

The production, which fans of this title or genre won’t want to miss despite its relatively modest scale, has another huge asset in Matt Crowle, who plays the comic off-lead, Luther Billis. He’s generally a standard-issue rascal, assigned to behave badly and create laughs. But Crowle, who is never anything but a live and thoroughly unpredictable onstage presence, shows you a whole inner life of a restless Seabee, far smarter than his own commanding officers, that you don’t usually get to see.

More could be done with the romantic B-plot between Colby’s Cable and Sarah Lo’s very charming Liat, another of the show’s many complex relationships. And although Yvonne Strumecki, who plays Bloody Mary, is a fabulous singer, this feels like a role she has played many time before, and it needs better connecting to the whole.

Still, the relatively small orchestra and ensemble under the musical direction of Roberta Duchak make a beautiful sound, and both Otis Sallid’s choreography and Scott Davis’ modestly beguiling set have secrets, slowly revealed. It’s quite a lovely “South Pacific,” all in all, at once restless and compassionate.